Twisters - Oklahoma whirlwind
Director Lee Isaac Chung shares his Twisters highlights: bull-riding bars, road trips — and Vietnamese food
Lucy Thackray - 17 July 2024
Twisters, as its name suggests fairly heavily, is the sequel to classic 90s storm-chasing movie Twister. And if that fact hasn’t already sent you spinning off towards your local cinema to see it, director Lee Isaac Chung has two more that might. One of them is the natural wonder of Oklahoma, where it was filmed: “As humans,” he says, “we don’t get many opportunities to encounter things so much bigger than us, that fill us with awe, fear and reverence, in the way that extreme storms and massive cloud structures do. This film lets people get up close and personal to these things that can help us step out of our own selves.” And the other fact? “There’s Glen Powell in a wet, white T-shirt,” he jokes of his famously handsome leading man. Chung knows Oklahoma well, having also filmed Minari (nominated for Best Picture at the 2021 Oscars) there, and is happy to play unofficial ambassador. Here are his highlights…
WILD, RURAL BEAUTY
“For this film, I was searching for places that would look like a wide expanse, places where the horizon is very far away,” says Chung. “Oklahoma has these ‘shock’ green landscapes – the greens are so vivid and verdant that it can feel like a jolt to the senses, and the sky is incredibly blue. But what you find most interesting when you’re there is the variety and the beauty of the storm clouds. We were filming during tornado season in an area called Tornado Alley, and people on the crew said they had never seen anything like them before. It can be strikingly beautiful. Working outside together was really the best time we had: starting before sunrise and ending at sunset, out in the fields, under windmills and under storm clouds, there was something so poetic about that, and it was really bonding for us.”
BULL-RIDING BARS AND SKYSCRAPER RESTAURANTS
“We were based in Oklahoma City, where there’s not a lot to do. So that really prompted the actors to hang out and have fun with each other. They showed me a video of a bar they found which has live bull-riding inside (cowboysokc.com). It looked wild – a bar-slash club with people actually riding bulls inside. I know that Daisy [Edgar-Jones, one of the film’s stars] went. “My interests were a little tamer – I try not to drink when I’m filming, but I’m a big coffee guy, so I got really into a roastery called Clarity .As a crew, we would hang out in an area called Bricktown, going to bars or seeing movies together. There are a lot of microbreweries there. One of the best restaurants we found was called Vast, which is one of the most scenic restaurants in America – it’s at the top of the tallest building in Oklahoma (vastokc.com).”
TASTE OF SOUTH EAST ASIA
“I sought out a lot of Asian food. One surprise for me was that there’s a big Vietnamese community in Oklahoma City, since a lot of refugees settled there in the 70s and 80s, so there are some really old and charming Vietnamese restaurants. One of our producers is half-Vietnamese and he treated us to this amazing banquet at one of them. But my favourite find was a Laotian restaurant called Ma Der Lao. I couldn’t believe that there was such authentic South East Asian food in this city. Oklahoma is also a cattle state, so there’s plenty of barbecue and meats, too.”
BEYOND OKLAHOMA CITY
“I shot some of my earlier film Minari in Tulsa, which is more eastern Oklahoma – it’s a little greener and more mountainous, and it’s a very important place for music. There’s also a city called Pawhuska that is really interesting to go to: Martin Scorsese filmed some of Killers of the Flower Moon there. It’s inside Osage Nation, and that’s a very old part of the State. “For a more rural atmosphere, you could visit one of the big parks – Natural Falls State Park, which is somewhere I used to go as a kid (travelok.com/state-parks/natural-falls-statepark), or Wichita Mountains which has a lot of wildlife, like bison, longhorn and elk, river otters and prairie dogs (fws.gov/refuge/wichita-mountains).”
AN UNDERRATED ROAD TRIP
“Tourists should absolutely consider Oklahoma, Arkansas and those central-southern states for a road trip. The area of Arkansas I grew up in, around the Ozark mountains, is more considered the ‘hillbilly south’; while Oklahoma, over the border, is the start of the American West. It has this rich history of indigenous people, cowboys, westerns and the American frontier – it’s called the Sooner State because it opened itself up to people from all over the world to come and settle. Essentially, whoever got here ‘soonest’. So anyone who’s fascinated by cowboy culture should go, but there are also many tribal and indigenous lands, groups and cultures to visit, as well as the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City (nationalcowboymuseum.org). It is devoted to that cowboy culture as well as Native American culture, and how those two things have intersected throughout history. It’s very different from the Deep South, it’s a different vibe.